The only important thing now is to save a buck. New York City. Joan Howell (Sandra Dee) intends to be an actress but for now she’s working as a maid. On three different occasions, she and Tom Milford (Bobby Darin) – a successful publishing executive and womaniser – accidentally bump into each other. The third time, Tom asks her for a date. Embarrassed by her own modest rented apartment, which she shares with fellow aspiring-actress friend Audrey (Nita Talbot), Joan invites him to the lavish apartment of one of her clients whom she believes to be out of town for a couple of weeks pretending it’s hers. What she doesn’t know, because she and her employer have never met, is that the apartment is Tom’s. He shocked to find himself being welcomed to his own place but he plays along to see how far Joan’s prepared to go. He then moves in with his friend Harvey Granson (Donald O’Connor) who has his own concerns about Joan to do with his acrimonious divorce and property he’s ‘hiding’ from his wife at Tom’s place. As soon as Joan becomes aware of the truth, however, she figures out how she might get even, starting with getting rid of Tom’s beautiful English-tailored suits … You know I’ve got the funniest feeling somebody’s trying to tell us something. Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee were a seemingly golden couple and this was the third time they were paired together in starring roles. It’s a mild comedy and a silly premise but it’s played for all it’s worth by a nice cast. The screenplay by David R. Schwartz from a story by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore quickly pits our lovely couple together in a meet-cute scenario that’s the conclusion of a voiced montage about how all kinds of creatures collide: the key takeaway being, Bobby and Sandra can’t miss! How they keep coming back together is the whole show. The zipper’s stuck. Leo G. Carroll plays the heavily Oirish-accented pawnbroker Mr O’Shee, which provides the start of a running gag; Reta Shaw is one of the women who find Tom half-naked in a phone booth and Don Haggerty does a Zasu Pitts as the policeman who cannot believe his eyes on more than one occasion especially when a line of extravagantly garbed prostitutes shows up on his beat. There’s more eyerolling from the reliable Robert (Stalag 17) Strauss and Ben Lessy as bartenders who observe the ups and downs of the romance with pleasantly predictable cynicism. Could be he IS an interior decorator. O’Connor is given little to do which is surprising but Larry Storch does a good job as thespian Luther, ready to give the girls advice on the acting biz. How the knotty but lovely and loved-up pair of midcentury blond gods figure out their essential problem – mutual deception – as they constantly mistake the other’s line of work is fairly fun but it’s the ensemble that really make this PG sex comedy a decent watch. Naturally the title song over the weird (astronomy) titles and credits is written and performed by the redoubtable Darin. Directed by Richard Thorpe. Have you never seen a naked man in a phone booth?
I’ll be chopped up into little pieces and end up all over the river. Montreal Airport: Lisa (Samantha Jones) takes a flight from to New York City, smuggling bags of heroin sewn inside an old-fashioned doll. When she disembarks, she becomes worried on seeing a man (Alan Arkin) watching her from the airport roof. She gives the doll to a fellow passenger, professional photographer Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.), for safekeeping. She is roughly escorted away by the other man. A few days later, con artists Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston) a crooked NYPD cop, arrive at the Greenwich Village apartment of Sam, recently married to Susy (Audrey Hepburn), who was newly blinded in an accident, believing it to be Lisa’s place. Harry Roat, the man who met Lisa at the airport, arrives to persuade Talman and Carlino to help him find the doll. After the con men discover Lisa’s body hanging in a wardrobe in Susy’s apartment, Roat blackmails them into helping him dispose of it and convinces them to help him find the doll. While Sam is on an assignment, the criminals begin an elaborate con using Susy’s blindness against her and posing as different people to win her trust. Implying that Lisa has been murdered and that Sam will be suspected, the men persuade Susy to help them find the doll. Mike, posing as Sam’s old army buddy using information gleaned from his previous recce, gives her the number for the phone booth across the street as his own after falsely warning her of a police car outside the basement apartment. Gloria (Julie Herrod) a girl who lives in an upstairs apartment and who had borrowed the doll without permission, sneaks in to return it. She reveals to Susy that there is no police car outside. After calling Mike and realising it’s the phone booth’s number, Susy figures out that the three men are criminals and hides the doll. She tells them it’s at Sam’s studio and the three leave after Roat cuts the telephone line. Carlino stays behind to stand guard outside the building. Susy sends Gloria to the bus station to wait for Sam. When she finds out that the telephone cord has been cut, she prepares to defend herself by breaking all the lightbulbs in the apartment except for the safelight. When did you figure it out about me? When Mike returns, he realises that she knows the truth and demands the doll but she refuses to cooperate. He tells her that he has sent Carlino to kill Roat. Having anticipated their plan, Roat has killed Carlino instead, and then kills Mike on the doorstep of Susy’s apartment, his body falling down the stairs. Intent on acquiring the doll, Roat threatens to set the apartment on fire … Do I have to be the world’s champion blind lady? Alfred Hitchcock said you acquire a play for its construction and he should know. He developed Dial M For Murder by Frederick Knott with great success (especially for his new muse Grace Kelly) and this similar chamber piece by Knott was a huge Broadway hit starring Lee Remick that became a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn with her husband Mel Ferrer in the producer’s seat (a situation that apparently contributed to the end of their already fraught union). Warner Bros. had bought the property prior to its Broadway success so convinced were they of its possibilities but according to her biographer Alexander Walker, Hepburn wanted her participation announced quickly to avoid the situation she’d endured with My Fair Lady when she was accused of stealing the lead from an untested Julie Andrews so discussions were going on prior to the production of How To Steal a Million in 1965. For tax reasons Hepburn wanted to shoot in Europe but that preference and her wish to be costumed by Givenchy was knocked on the head. Initially the aforementioned Hitchcock was mooted as possible director but he immediately rejected the studio’s offer because of Hepburn’s leaving No Bail for the Judge half a dozen years earlier when she wouldn’t agree to the inclusion of a violent rape scene and the project remained unmade. Thus charming British James Bond helmer Terence Young, who a teenage Hepburn had helped escape from Holland when he was shot down during the war, was in the director’s chair. Hepburn prepared meticulously for the role, visiting a clinic for the blind in Lausanne and continuing at the Lighthouse Clinic in New York where some of the film was made (as well as in Toronto) prior to shooting at Warners’ Burbank studio in Hollywood. For all of Hepburn’s detailed physical work, she ended up having to wear hard contact lenses to cover up her inimitably sparkling eyes, removing at least one of her trademarks which cinematographer Charles Lang did his best to illuminate. In a way this is a fraternal (or sororal) twin to the setup in Hepburn’s comic thriller Charade, with three men after something Hepburn doesn’t know she possesses. This thriller as adapted by husband and wife screenwriting team Robert Carrington & Jane-Howard Carrington has no comedy elements however and the premise starts by setting up a drug smuggling story in Canada with a deliriously beautiful woman (model Jones) who will eventually be found dead in one deeply awful moment of discovery: first when she’s seen by Mike and then when Susy puts on her scarf and unwittingly disturbs the dead woman’s hair. It’s a perverse sign of things to come. Arkin’s splashy star-making triple role of the various Roat characters might logically be questioned – how can our blind protagonist spot the difference? (She notes the commonality, in fact). Roat dispenses with his goons as expected and they are performed exceedingly well by the charming Crenna and compelling Weston, both of whom exhibit traces of guilt and fear. Damn it, you act as if you’re in kindergarten! This is the big bad world, full of mean people, where nasty things happen! In the end it’s a one on one fight and when the camera shoots wide for the final attack on Hepburn cinema audiences screamed louder than they’d done since Psycho: theatre owners were warned to turn down their lights to make it an immersive experience. It’s a brilliant shock, a literal jump scare, excellently staged. Everything in the suspenseful narrative leading up to that situation is about how Susy compensates for her devastating sight loss – that’s a classic dramatic writing tool, utilising the protagonist’s apparent weakness and turning it to their advantage. There’s a terrific performance by child actor Herrod as the ungainly little girl whose behaviour is entirely unpredictable but who ultimately proves her worth as an ally, providing Susy with the eyesight she no longer has. This is all about how appearances can be deceptive. Everything planted is paid off in spades. Hepburn may not be outfitted in her preferred designer but she is gifted another Henry Mancini score (using two pianos, a quarter tone apart with eerie echoing phrases) and theme song to accompany this wholly impressive heroine, stripped back to her essence, deprived of one of her senses, cornered behind a refrigerator door by a drug-ridden madman, fighting for her life. It’s a totally committed physical performance, among Hepburn’s very best. Despite receiving an Academy Award nomination, her fifth, she wouldn’t make another film for eight years, divorcing Ferrer, marrying a Roman psychiatrist and having another child, before the world of cinema finally lured her back to Robin and Marian. She would reunite a few years following that with director Young for Bloodline, a disappointing potboiler. How would you like to something difficult and incredibly dangerous?
I know everything about Spain except Spanish. Twentysomething American Susie Higgins (Pamela Tiffin) arrives in the Spanish city of Madrid and moves in with her old college roommate secretary Maggie Williams (Carol Lynley) and Maggie’s roommate Fran Hobson (Ann-Margret). Still a virgin, Susie is surprised to find both of the other girls have active dating lives. Maggie has recently ended an affair and is now seeing her married boss newsman Paul Barton (Brian Keith) much to the dismay of Paul’s jealous wife Jane (Gene Tierney). At the same time, Maggie’s co-worker Pete McCoy (Gardner McKay) is in love with Maggie but she barely notices him and he’s thinking of going to the bureau in Paris. Fran, an aspiring actress, flamenco dancer and singer, eagerly pursues Spanish doctor Andres Brioñes (Andre Lawrence). While at the Prado Museum, in front of Las Meninas by Velazquez, Susie catches the eye of wealthy playboy Emilio Lacayo (Tony Franciosa) who adds her to his already large group of girlfriends and who is already familiar with Maggie. The three girls spend the summer attending various parties while pursuing and being pursued by the men in their lives including a weekend in Toledo where Susie pretends to fall for Emilio and faints at a bullfight … Life has aged us in a week. Essentially a transplanted musical remake of the previous decade’s Three Coins in the Fountain and helmed by the same director, Jean Negulesco once again for Fox, this moves the action to Madrid and suffers a little since only Ann-Margret among the young leading ladies can sing and dance. She gets a nice entrance from under the covers with the line, Gone native and then has a terrific meet-cute on the street with a scooter-riding medic. Tiffin’s romantic moment is when she’s found by Emilio weeping at the wonderful art in the Prado which she explains away as homesickness. He’s the most heartless corrupt inhuman man who ever lived, Maggie tells Susie. You’ve just been chosen as the next sacrificial lamb. Edith Sommer’s screenplay is also derived from John H. Secondari’s 1952 source novel Coins in the Fountain and it was the second time the screenwriter was attached to a film with Lynley after the controversial Blue Denim. More brittle in tone than its predecessor possibly due to the changing times yet still luxuriating in the surroundings with stunning exterior cinematography by Daniel L. Fapp around Madrid, Marbella, Toledo and Castile, these are not complemented by the obvious studio sets used for the interiors. There’s a bright (and very popular) score by Lionel Newman (and an uncredited Alexander Courage) and it’s a wonderful showcase for the country as well as the performers, not to mention the opportunity to learn about Spanish art. Watch out for Antonio Gades performing a flamenco. He would become famous for his dancing and choreography which are memorialised in Carlos Saura’s Blood Wedding and Carmen in the 1980s. Lynley is posited against Tierney when she becomes The Other (Younger) Woman and they’ve one great bitchy scene together. Sadly this was Tierney’s final feature credit. This is also the final film for veteran actress Isobel Elsom (as Emilio’s formidable mother Donya Teresa) and she also appeared in that year’s My Fair Lady: not a bad way to go out. Just don’t go round thinking that I’m easy because I was once. Lynley’s tussle with Keith is tender, tough and believable. Everybody in Spain dances the flamenco! The theme song performed by an uncredited Ann-Margret is written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. She bemoaned the film’s box office failure (it wasn’t the big hit anticipated but did okay) which she said could be attributed to audiences not wanting to see her grow up. Mother told me never to knock. She told me I’d meet more interesting people that way. Tiffin has fun toying with the affections of Franciosa. She had been lauded as the next Audrey Hepburn by Billy Wilder when she featured in One, Two, Three and she would later run away to Rome after shooting Harper with Paul Newman. That’s a hell of a career trajectory. Maybe she was pining for the city as it was in 1953 – like this probably is. We’d like to read Tom Lisanti’s biography of the lovely actress and talented comedienne who died in December 2020. That’s next on our reading list! Look out for Manola Moran as the traffic cop and Vito Scotti as the suave neighbour. The tart response to this film is probably Woody Allen’s decidedly twenty-first century Vicky Cristina Barcelona, an endlessly watchable sorbet revisiting this rather richer fare. The romantic trials and tribulations of twentysomethings with marriage on their minds never get old. The late Lynley was born 13th February 1942 and this is in her honour. Happy Galentine’s Day! All I did was fall in love
Aka Survival.All normal forms of communications appear to have broken down. Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland), his wife Ann (Jean Hagen), their son Rick (Frankie Avalon) and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) leave suburban Los Angeles at sunrise to go on a fishing trip to the Sierra Nevada wilderness, bringing with them a small camping trailer. After a couple of hours on the road, Harry and Ann are startled by an unusually bright light, accompanied by the radio station going to static. Tuning through stations, they hear a sporadic news report broadcast on CONELRAD that hint at the start of a nuclear war, confirmed when the Baldwins see a large mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb rising over Los Angeles, now many miles away. The family attempt to return home to rescue Ann’s mother but Harry soon realises that the roads will be clogged by panicked people and what is left of the city will be saturated in atomic fallout. Stopping at a small diner to get food and find out what is happening, Harry hears that Los Angeles was hit by two hydrogen bombs: One over Downtown Los Angeles, the other at the Port of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco were also targets. With this news, deciding that his family’s survival must come first, Harry decides to continue to their secluded holiday spot in the mountains, abandoning Ann’s mother back in LA and weather the crisis from there. In the next few days we’re going to have the kind of togetherness we never dreamt of. The Baldwins stop to buy supplies at a small town off the main road, which has not yet been inundated by refugees from the city. Harry attempts to purchase tools and guns from hardware store owner Ed Johnson (Richard Garland) with a combination of $200 cash and a personal cheque for the remainder. However, Johnson believes only Los Angeles has been hit and the government remains intact, so he insists on following state law and withholding the guns for a 24 hours while Harry’s cheques are verified. Harry absconds with the weapons with Rick’s help but he tells Johnson that he will eventually return and pay for them in full. Back on the road, the family encounter three threatening young hoodlums, Carl (Richard Bakalyan), Mickey (Rex Holman) and Andy (Neil Nephew) but manage to fend them off. There must be some good people left. After a harrowing journey, the Baldwins reach their destination. Realising their trailer offers no protection from radioactive fallout, they take the contents of the trailer and find shelter in a cave where they settle in and wait for civil order to be restored. On their portable radio, they listen to war news and learn that what remains of the UN has declared this to be Year Zero … I guess there’s no such thing as complete isolation. Based on a screenplay by John Morton and Jay Simms from a story by Simms, this is tough stuff, particularly for its era and feels rather close to the knuckle in these dangerous days. It pulls no punches in the rapid descent to aggressive and brutal dissent. This realistic portrait of the aftermath of an atomic bomb is notable for its commitment to the idea that society will immediately fragment and the term ‘civilisation’ figures largely. Director and star Milland as pragmatic Harry ruefully admits, I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself. His relationship with wife Ann (an underused Hagen – initially!) fractures when he takes charge in a radical way and we can only presume Avalon was cast as his son due to his fan base, an attractive factor for producers American International Pictures who had him tour the US when it went out across the states after making its money back in LA. Mitchel is attacked horrifically by the violent hoodlums whose situation is finally avenged but in the doing another young woman is discovered and it is Rick’s idea to rescue her, not his father’s. It’s an unusual role for Milland and he’s the better for it, a wannabe warrior whose instincts are correct but sometime his judgment is lacking. Intelligent people don’t just turn their back on the rest of the world, Ann reasons. As much as Harry wants to protect his family he ultimately realises his limitations but there is humour here too. Nothing like eating under an open sky, even if it is radioactive, muses Rick. The use of sex as a weapon in what is essentially civil war has a grim outcome for this close knit family. And when mom Ann finally takes action in a story that deprives her of input or consequence for the first two-thirds of the story, it’s decisive. This isn’t exactly optimistic about mankind and save for a few obvious studio shots Milland the director marshals the action well. A striking, serious and atmospheric work, filled with foreboding – and guns. Our country is still full of thieving, murdering patriots
Very clever the Russians, aren’t they. Cambridge University. Astrophysics professor David Garrett (Ian Carmichael) is working on tracking Russian rocket launches. He meets up with an old mentor and friend, Professor Frank Melnicker (George Pravda) who is playing multiple games of chess at a display of simultaneous play at a local temperance hall. Garrett is confused by the apparently secretive way that one player, Paul Richter (Kieron Morre) transfers the knight chess piece to Melnicker. When Melnicker notices two individuals enter the hall he is distracted and excuses himself for the lunch break. Garrett offers to drive Melnicker to his hotel. There are two men (James Houlihand and Leslie Crawford) waiting for Melnicker outside. When Garrett intimates that since they are in England that Melnicker could find safety, Melnicker cryptically tells Garrett that he should recall his seventh chess move. Garrett’s driver (Judy Parfitt) informs him that Major McPherson (Edward Chapman) wishes to meet with him. The Major tells Garrett that he must stop socialising with Melnicker since he is a known East German communist. Garrett arrives at the Ministry of Defence for a meeting, and while in the bathroom a box of chess pieces is dropped off to him that his driver believes he mistakenly left in the car. In fact, it was left by Melnicker. It contains the knight chess piece and a money belt containing a large amount of cash. Garrett takes the chess piece and money belt with him and leaves the building to return to the hall where the chess demonstration was happening. When he arrives at the hall he finds the display being torn down, with the demonstration cancelled due to Melnicker not returning after lunch. Garrett remembers the moves Melnicker had made and comes up with king’s square four. When he says this to a cabby, the man suggests they drive to King’s Square, an address in Chelsea, Garrett rings the doorbell and a young woman named Maggie (Janet Munro) calls to him from the second floor. She is apparently expecting him and throws down keys so he can let himself in. Others arrive, – there for a wedding reception. Garrett is starting to wonder if he’s in the right place, when he sees Maggie talking to Richter and finds a room upstairs with a chessboard that is missing the knight piece he has in his pocket. Garrett talks with Maggie and finds out she does know of Melnicker. Maggie then says she has to leave and Garrett leaves alone after copying down Maggie’s phone number. Outside Garrett realises two men are following him. A running chase happens, with Garrett escaping by hiding in a children’s sandbox in Royal Chelsea Gardens which is packed with nannies and their charges. He phones Maggie and says he must meet up with her so he can return the money to Melnicker. Maggie tells Garrett to meet her at the train station at Watford, where she convinces him to board the train with her. On the train, Garrett continues to ask Maggie where Melnicker is and where they are travelling to but they’re going through Grantham. Maggie seems to be avoiding committing to anything and Garrett resigns himself to continuing on the train for the time being. Sometime later Maggie goes out into the corridor to smoke a cigarette and notices two men she identifies as secret police that they must avoid. They are chased around in the train until Maggie pulls the emergency stop cord and she and Garrett jump off the train. After a series of mishaps they are picked up by a bargeman called Wilkins (Hugh Griffith) who’s travelling with a menagerie, escaping potential nuclear disaster to what he calls his Magical Island … I think the game would have turned out quite differently if you had realised the importance of my seventh move. A Cold War picaresque, you say? We have just the thing! This jaunty jape-filled English travelogue is replete with Noah’s Ark (on a barge), a pixie-like love interest who is just this short of manic dream girl, a scientist who can’t swim but manages to rig a bomb in a boat and sexier-than-thou Curt Jurgens posing political equivocations in a series of chess moves but manages to get himself checkmated. Carmichael is of course an unlikely romantic hero but in his early Sixties customary comic-satiric mode he’s quite the dashing Hannay-style wrong man protagonist in a film that owes probably as much to Hitchcock and Buchan as the source novel by Harold Greene, adapted for the screen by Robert Foshko and David Stone. When our (eventually) romantic couple goes walkabout and winds up being picked up by Wilkins on a barge which transpires is filled with pairs of animals and 136 bottles of Jamaican rum it’s a highly diverting interlude filled with references to Shakespeare as this former teacher bemoans the colleague who advised in case of nuclear armageddon, cover your head with a brown paper bag. Garrett is inclined to agree with his colleague. Rather amusingly, there’s a graphic of the H-bomb behind this prepper declaring Annihilation Imminent. After a spell hitchhiking and meeting their nemesis Richter which winds up in a literal cliffhanger and apparent death, things can only conclude by meeting the main man, Hubert Marek (Jurgens), at a fortress-like hostelry where mind games matter as much as chess before Garrett uses his own little grey cells after being confronted Poirot-like by every player in the story. Then he goes all Tintin (L’Ile Noire) and figures things out. It’s an ingenious plot that might have been a bit better handled but the constant trickery, chess moves, the toilet and sex references, the theatrical quotes and the sheer chutzpah of the twist are all to be cherished in a film that has a deceptive tone all its own. This is billed as (producer) Hal E. Chester’s Hide and Seek which is a bit of a cheek even in these days of possessory credits. Beautifully shot in black and white by Gilbert Taylor, this is directed by Cy Endfield and was made before Zulu but released months after that fabled film. This probably wasn’t his wheelhouse but he makes a pretty good fist of a tongue in cheek Cold War movie that is as far from Bond as we could imagine even if starts off with a stonking rocket launch. What is all this horseplay?
Aka A Boy Ten Feet Tall.We’re not going south. Port Said, Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Ten-year old English boy Sammy Hartland (Fergus McClelland) lives with his ex-pat parents. When they are killed in a bombing while Sammy is playing by the canal, he flees the city in the ensuing panic. He sets out to reach his only living relative, Aunt Jane (Zena Walker) his mother’s sister whom he has never met and who lives 5,000 miles to the south in Durban, South Africa, the other end of the continent. Along his journey Sammy encounters a colourful array of characters. His first guide is an Arab peddler (Zia Mohyeddin) who takes him over the mountains and dies in a freak accident when a stone explodes in a fire and ruins his eyes. Sammy is then rescued in Luxor by wealthy tourist Gloria van Imhoff (Constance Cummings) who pays Spyros Dracandopoulos (Paul Stassino) to find him when Sammy runs off and takes a ferry along the Nile. He encounters a gruff old hunter and diamond smuggler, Cocky Wainwright (Edward G. Robinson) whose life is subsequently saved by the boy after Sammy shoots dead a leopard the old man is hunting. The news is out that the boy is missing and being sought. When the police search for Sammy, he pretends he never wanted him for anything except the money being offered as a reward for finding him. Then they arrest the old man, who has been a fugitive for years … Jumpin’ Jehosophat, don’t you think I’ve got eyes in my head?! Perhaps it’s a moot point as to whether director Alexander Mackendrick can be classed an auteur given the variability of his output and this is probably categorised at the lesser end of his films which included the masterpieces Sweet Smell of Success and The Ladykillers. This portrait of childhood is tough yet engaging, somewhere in the sphere of the later A High Wind in Jamaica yet very much moving to its own beat. This boy is tough, wary, diffident, trusting, smart, scared and engaging and newcomer McClelland is given a lot to do with a cast of different characters, most of whom appear to want something from him. He is basically worth a reward and he puts together his own worth. It starts when he loses his parents after he’s been playing down at the Suez Canal – we are placed in the major news event of the late 50s by dint of radio bulletins – and then narrowly avoids a beating by an Egyptian teenager. What follows is an amazing travelogue and his path is traced from Port Said to Luxor, the White Nile, the Sudan and finally Durban, all in different vehicles from donkeys and taxis to a ferry and a missed train and even a plane ride. The wallet he carries is from the rascal who gains his trust with the line, Don’t be frightened. I’m not Egyptian. I’m Syrian. I’m pro-British! That tallies with what was on the verge of being done to him on the streets of Port Said. When the man dies horrifically (we see his death from the child’s point of view) Sammy is smart enough to liberate his wallet which Gloria then finds and Spyros figures out it was stolen when he sees the photo of a sexpot tucked away in it. Adapted from the W. H. Canaway novel by Denis Cannan, this gains traction from the intertitles – starting in December 1956 and finishing March 1957, lending it a realism. But this is not a kid who spreads sweetness and light despite the blond hair and blue eyes – he’s tough as old boots and seems to leave disaster in his wake. When he is presented with the dead leopard’s offspring and Cocky tells the preternatual crack shot he just killed the animal’s mother there is genuine anguish in his eyes at putting the beautiful creature in the same situation as his own – that of an orphan. The moment passes - then he wears her skin – just like Tarzan, he declares. He gets over things but he has to do it on his own terms. The relationship with Cocky is that of a son and a father but Lem (Harry H. Corbett) tells Cocky if he wanted to do that he should have thought of it twenty years earlier. Cocky knows this boy’s heart and he lets him go with a lie which Sammy realises later on. Perhaps this isn’t a classic exactly but it’s determinedly unsentimental, relentlessly pitting this singleminded child on a path towards individuation and experience, come what may. Beautifully shot on location in Kenya (with some second unit shots done clandestinely in Egypt) in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor by the venerable Erwin Hillier, this received its premiere before Queen Elizabeth II 18th March 1963. He has to be left alone
It’s been scientifically proven to be the happiest music track ever due to its seven-chord and traditional verse/chorus/verse construction so it’s a must on the worst day of the year! Enjoy!
I felt I had to tell you even if it would interrupt your writing. Four family members take their holiday on a remote Swedish island, shortly after one of them, Karin (Harriet Andersson) is released from a mental hospital where she has been treated for schizophrenia. Karin’s husband Martin (Max von Sydow), a doctor, tells her widowed father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) that Karin’s disease is almost incurable. Meanwhile, Minus (Lars Passgård), Karin’s 17-year-old brother, tells Karin that he wishes he could have a real conversation with their father and feels deprived of his father’s affection. David is a novelist suffering from writer’s block who has just returned from a long trip to Switzerland. He announces he will leave again in a month, this time for Dubrovnik, though he promised he would stay around. The other three perform a play for him that Minus has written. David feigns his approval but takes offence since the play could be interpreted as an attack on his character. That night, after rejecting Martin’s erotic overtures, Karin wakes up and follows the sound of a foghorn to the attic. She faints after she hears voices behind the peeling wallpaper. She then enters David’s room and after he puts her to sleep on the couch and leaves the room she looks through his desk and finds his diary, seeing his description of her disease as incurable. She discovers his desire to record the details of her deterioration. The following morning, David and Martin, while fishing, confront each other over Karin. Martin accuses David of sacrificing his daughter for his art and of being self-absorbed, callous, cowardly and phony. You’re trying to fill your void with Karin’s extinction. David is evasive but admits that much of what Martin says is true. David says that he recently tried to kill himself by driving over a cliff during his stay in Switzerland but was saved by a faulty transmission. He says that after that, he discovered that he loves Karin, Minus and Martin, and this gives him hope. Meanwhile, Karin tells Minus about her episodes, and that she is waiting for God to appear behind the wallpaper in the attic. Minus is somewhat sexually frustrated, and Karin teases him, even more so after she discovers that he hides a porn magazine. Later, on the beach, when Karin sees that a storm is coming, she runs into a wrecked ship and huddles in fear. Minus goes to her and she embraces him incestuously before recoiling in shock at her overture. Minus tells his father about the incident in the ship and Martin calls for an ambulance. Karin asks to speak with her father alone. She confesses her misconduct toward Martin and Minus, saying that a voice told her to act that way and also to search David’s desk. She tells David she would like to remain at the hospital, because she cannot go back and forth between two realities but must choose one … Am I little or has the illness made a child of me? Do you think I’m strange? The first in Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s Faith trilogy, this is a precise portrait of family, isolation, mental illness and the vicious vaunting ambition of writers. You’re hunting for themes. Your own daughter’s mental illness! This horrible exchange around 52 minutes in reminds us of the famous Nora Ephron saying, Everything is copy. The first of Bergman’s films to be shot on the island of Faro (at the suggestion of his regular collaborator, cinematographer Sven Nykvist), this quite personal four-hander was conceived as a Strindbergian three-act play, featuring the steady acceleration of tension as the daughter succumbs to the worst aspects of mental illness following a major discovery and each act forming a mirror panel to reveal the drama from different angles. It’s always about you and yours. Your callousness is perverse, say von Sydow as the son-in-law to the remote novelist heartlessly exploiting his daughter’s condition for his writerly ends. I think it’s God who shall reveal himself to us, declares Karin, before admitting she has seen God and he is a spider. What the hell can I do? wails her younger brother having escaped her clutches yet wanting her to regain her health. Eventually as Karin descends into the depths of madness her father recognises the re-enacting of history – Karin is going the way of her late mother and he finally understands his own role in the women’s demise. Utterly desolate and merciless, with Andersson unforgettable as the young woman who finally loses her mind. I can’t live in two worlds
I can’t believe we’re spliced. I feel just the same. Working class London cockney teenagers Dot (Rita Tushingham) and biker Reggie (Colin Campbell) get married even though she lives freely under her mother’s (Betty Marsden) roof, encouraged to get together with him. Their marriage soon turns sour. During an unsuccessful honeymoon at a Butlins holiday camp in Bognor Regis, Reggie becomes alienated from the brassy, self-absorbed Dot who gets her hair dyed blonde and is far too vivacious in company. Afterward, they begin to live increasingly separate lives as Reggie becomes more involved with his biker friends, especially the eccentric Pete (Dudley Sutton). Reggie also loses interest in having sex with Dot who never cleans up their bedsit and can’t cook. When Reggie’s grandfather dies, Dot complains that Reggie’s support for his bereaved grandmother has stopped them visiting the cinema. Her boorish behaviour at the funeral and her refusal to move in with Reggie’s grandmother (Gladys Henson) leads to a big row. She leaves, while Reggie remains with his grandmother, who will not leave her own house. He brings in Pete, who has been forced to leave his lodgings, to stay as a lodger with her. The two share a bed. Meanwhile, Dot shows an interest in Brian (Johnny Briggs) another biker. The following day, Pete and Reggie drive to the seaside. Reggie wants them to chat up a couple of girls but Pete has no interest. Reggie now intends returning to Dot, who has hatched a plan to get him back by pretending to be pregnant. Dot is sitting with Brian when she tells Reggie of her supposed pregnancy. Believing he can’t possibly be the father, Reggie accuses Brian and the two men fight. Men? You look like a couple of queers. Dot visits Reggie’s grandmother’s house where she learns that he shares his bed with Pete and argues with the pair of them when she sees how they are living. … People don’t talk like that in real life. Adapted by Gillian Freeman from her 1961 novel (which she published pseudonymously as ‘Eliot George’!), this febrile drama speaks to a London of a certain era before the high rises destroyed communities but according to Tushingham the dialogue the cast were given was out of touch and didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, something they realised when they hung out with London’s real biker subculture. She, Campbell and Sutton improvised much of it in the company of Canadian director Sidney J. Furie who gave them all a couple of days off during the Cuban Missile Crisis (this was shot September-October 1962) because he was so depressed about what seemed like the end of the world. Speaking on Talking Pictures’ documentary Back to The Ace with Rita Tushingham, the leading lady, who was twenty during production, recalls the fun they had on set, the opportunity to visit Butlins in Bognor Regis (which she declares she would never ordinarily have done!) and how innovative Sutton was – he certainly has some fruity lines. When he takes advantage of his friend’s immature marriage it’s like a bomb going off. You look like a bunch of dead roses. He and Campbell died within 6 months of each other in 2018 while Briggs, another TV stalwart, died in 2021. Freeman was on set for several days and according to Tushingham she can be seen in a couple of shots. The Ace Cafe in London’s Wembley suburb on the North Circular, off Beresford Avenue between the Grand Union Canal and Stonebridge Park Depot, is still going strong today as a centre for bikers and rockers, after closing for a period after 1969 and being used as a tyre salesroom. The source novel had been suggested to Freeman by agent/publisher Anthony Blond as a Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs and it starts out as a story of an incompatible marriage but with that exploitation title you know it’s heading somewhere more interesting, going beyond the so-called kitchen sink realism tropes to an intersection of sex, class and gay life. Part of the attraction is of course the biking sequences, particularly the road trip to Edinburgh. It’s extraordinary to see how normal the treatment of two young working class men in a relationship could be at this point, given that homosexuality wouldn’t be decriminalised in the UK until 1967. The concluding sequence, when Reggie is finally exposed to the fact of Pete’s gay life at the Tidal Basin Tavern in Silvertown, provides a sharp shock for his character and forces a decision. Up to this point it’s really all subtext and insinuation. It’s certainly notable that it took writing by women to address the topic of homosexuality in the era with Victim (co-written by Janet Green) appearing a couple of years earlier but broaching the issue far more directly. By the time this was released Kenneth Anger’s legendary short film Scorpio Rising would explicitly link bikers with gay sex, receiving its premiered 29 October 1963 at the Gramercy Arts Theater in NYC. Locations for The Leather Boys include: Beresford Aveneue, Park Royal; Haydons Road and the Bethel Church on Kohat Road, Wimbledon; Harbut Road and Southolme Road (now demolished) in Wandsworth; and St Luke’s C of E School (now demolished) in Kingston Upon Thames, as well of course as Bognor Regis where the fresh cinematography of Gerald Gibbs is at its best. That sequence between the lads and Brenda (Valerie Varnam) and June (Jill Mai Meredith) is among the most flavourful in the film. This is beloved cult cinema, both familiar and groundbreaking, fascinating in terms of its position within British screen history, filled with contrasting performance styles and full of the distinctive visual flair of director Furie, still going strong in his ninetieth year. Freeman died in 2019 and aside from some clever novels, ballets and a pioneering study of pornographic literature, is also known for the Robert Altman thriller, That Cold Day in the Park. Her daughters Harriet and Matilda Thorpe are actresses. The Smiths’ 1987 song Girlfriend in a Coma is an homage to the film. Morrissey’s decision to put a Cilla Black cover on the B-side reportedly caused Johnny Marr to leave the band which is why they’re not in the video. We don’t have to live and die together – do we?
At the Ace Cafe in 2007.
The single’s cover featuring playwright Shelagh Delaney
Three fathers?! San Forino, a village in Italy. Carla ‘Campbell’ (Gina Lollobrigida) is an Italian woman who as a 16-year old twenty years earlier during the American occupation of Italy in WW2 slept with three American GIs in the course of 10 days, Cpl. Phil Newman (Phil Silvers), Lt. Justin Young (Peter Lawford) and Sgt. Walter Braddock (Telly Savalas). By the time she discovers she is pregnant, all three have moved on, and she, uncertain of which is the father, convinces each of the three (who are unaware of the existence of the other two) to support ‘his’ daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) financially over the years. To protect her reputation, as well as the reputation of her child, Carla has raised the girl to believe her mother is the widow of a non-existent army captain named Eddie Campbell, a name she borrowed from a can of soup (otherwise he would have been Captain Coca-Cola, the only other term she knew in English at the time). She shares her bed nowadays with Vittorio (Philippe Leroy) who works in her vineyard and she lives in a very nice house with a housekeeper and Gia is coming home from college. Now the three ex-airmen are attending a unit-wide reunion of the 293rd Squadron of the 15th Air Force in the village where they were stationed. The men are accompanied by their wives, Shirley Newman (Shelley Winters), Lauren Young (Marian Moses) and Fritzie Braddock (Lee Grant). In the Newmans’ case they are accompanied by their three fairly obnoxious boys. Carla is forced into a series of comic situations as she tries to keep them – each one anxious to meet his daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) for the first time – from discovering her secret while at the same time trying to keep Gia from running off to Paris to be with a much older married lecturer who will take her to Brazil. When confronted, Mrs. Campbell admits she does not know which of the three men is Gia’s father … I’m only one woman but my heart aches for three. Now more obvious as a source for the bonkers story of ABBA musical Mamma Mia! and its subsequent film adaptations, this expensive and smoothly told romcom from the camera-pen of Melvin Frank boasts a ridiculously good ensemble, fabulous locations and an enviable number of good lines in a characterful story. We paid more war damages than Germany. There are three terrific performances from the wives too, in a shrewdly cast lineup with contrasting physical and acting styles on display. At the centre of it all is La Lollo, trying to balance an impossible situation that is playful and funny with some decent slapstick and mastery of tone. It’s beautifully shot around Lazio and Rocca Catonera as well as Cinecitta Studios by Gabor Pogany. Riz Ortolani’s score keeps everything bouncing along including that title song performed by Jimmy Roselli. Co-written by Dennis Norden and Sheldon Keller, this is bright and enjoyable from beginning to end, even if there’s a necessarily quasi-sentimental conclusion. In Snow White the other dwarfs knew about each other
mondomovies 